Spending a week in the 1600s at Plimoth Plantation

A dozen boys and girls took part in a weeklong, hands-on Maritime Summer Adventure Camp at Pilgrim Plantation and aboard the freshly repaired Mayflower II. Counselors and educators shared a knack for tying the harrowing experiences of the Pilgrims’ voyage and first years in the colony to the lives of young people today.

Aboard the freshly repaired Mayflower II on a gusty Wednesday afternoon in Plymouth Harbor, 12-year-old Samuel Perry had just mastered tying a bowline knot when he got a quick lesson in how valuable a little 21st-century education would have been in a 17th-century world.

“Are you good at math?” George Ward, an educator aboard the ship, asked Samuel. “What grade are you going into?”

“Well, that’s the education level of a navigator. A sailor makes three pounds a year, but a navigator makes eight to 12 pounds a year if he’s good at math,” Ward said.

Samuel grinned a little at the news of his imaginary earning power. The boy from Bourne was among a dozen campers taking part in a weeklong, hands-on Maritime Summer Adventure Camp at Pilgrim Plantation and aboard the replica 106-foot ship.

Counselors and educators alike shared a knack for tying the harrowing experiences of the Pilgrims’ voyage and first years in the colony to the lives of these pre-adolescents.

Humor helps with the endeavor.

When Jade Sheldon, an 11-year-old from Sandwich, called out, “I want some ice cream,” the camp’s lead counselor, Vicki Oman, offered this rejoinder: “That’s unfortunate, because ice cream didn’t exist in the 17th century.”

The campers are big fans of Oman’s brand of teaching.

“Everybody here is awesome,” said Emma Esterman, a Plymouth teenager about to enter 10th grade. “And Vicki is great.”

To Vicki, now a counselor-in-training, the highlight of the week is undisputed – a sleep-over aboard the ship.

“You can pick wherever you want to sleep,” she said. “You feel like one of the sailors.”

The aspiring sailors need to be able to tell a binnacle from a conning hatch.

“I’m not going to let you sleep here if you don’t know the names of things,” Oman told the young campers as they stood near a 5-foot-tall wooden pole called a whipstaff. It is just below the Mayflower II’s top deck.

The air around the Mayflower II carried the aroma of the sea and pine tar, but campers learned that Pilgrims on the maiden voyage endured wretched and less aromatic conditions.

“It was dark and smelly and not much fresh air,” Oman told her campers. “There were no bathrooms … they didn’t bathe. You’d do your business in a bucket. And there were goats and chickens and pigs down there with them.”

Before spending the day and an overnight aboard Mayflower II, campers paddled a Wampanoag canoe – a mishoon – down the Eel River.

Page 2 of 2 - And they cooked fish, Wampanoag-style, on a spit over an open fire.

“It took a long time to cook,” said Patrick Murphy, a camper from Plymouth about to start ninth grade.

Patrick was one of the few kids to dig into the meal of Wampanoag fish.

And as he sat on the steerage hatch, tying a daisy-chain knot, he seemed right at home.